Copyright 1997 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY
All Rights Reserved
Second printing, and first paperback printing, 2002
Paperback ISBN 0-691-09281-8
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows
Stoner-Weiss, Kathryn, 1965
Local heroes: the political economy of Russian regional governance / Kathryn Stoner-Weiss.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-691-01195-8 (cl: alk. paper)
eISBN: 978-0-691-22804-4
1. Local governmentRussia (Federation) 2. Representative government and representationRussia (Federation) 3. Regional planningRussia (Federation) 4. Russia (Federation)Economic policy1991 I. Title.
JS6117.3.A3S76 1997
351.47dc21 97-7355
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
https://press.princeton.edu/
R0
* Preface *
T HIS BOOK is a study of a key aspect of one of the great dramas of modern timesthe reconstitution of the Russian polity and economy after more than seventy years of communist rule. As Russia endured the early phases of its transition to democracy and a market economy, newly democratic regional governments within the renewed Russian Federation faced fresh challenges and responsibilities. Capitalizing on a natural experiment, I hold institutional design constant in an effort to explain why some of the new democratic institutions in the Russian provinces weathered the monumental changes of the early 1990s better than others.
Drawing on the comparative politics literature on institutional performance, I develop a performance index that reveals significant variation among four sample regional governments. The remainder of the study is devoted to explaining variations in institutional performanceor why local heroes (higher-performing regional governments) existed in some places but not others. Using newly available economic, sociological, and political data, I probe the comparative politics literature on democratization for plausible explanations of performance variations. However, the best explanation for the variance in the performance of the new Russian representative institutions challenges those theories that rely on political culture, social structure, or wealth.
The theory here blends aspects of the political economy literature of the late 1970s and early 1980s on corporatist democracies with the newer comparative and international political economy literature. My empirical findings indicate that the legacy of the former economic system influenced the operation of new political institutions in important and often unexpected ways. I argue that in transitional situations the formation of coalitions between economic and political elites can have a positive effect on governmental performance. Past institutional structures, specifically the concentration of the regional economy (in terms of sector, labor, assets, and productive output), promoted the formation of political and economic coalitions within a new proto-democratic institutional framework. In sum, the more concentrated the regional economy, the higher was regional government performance.
These findings, however, will be somewhat troubling to students of democratic and market transitions. Although in the short term cooperation between key political and economic figures may promote stability within a transitional framework, in the longer term too much collaboration among a small set of actors may endanger the further growth of political pluralism. This collusive activity may also jeopardize the growth of market relations as regional governments may choose to artificially support and protect inefficient enterprises that market forces might otherwise force into bankruptcy.
A primary lesson of my argument, then, is that democracys short-term development might be quite different from what sustains it in the longer term. The local heroes of today must therefore take care not to become the nemeses of the further growth of democracy and the market in the future.
Throughout this project I have had the good fortune to have been challenged and encouraged by many friends and colleagues. While I cannot begin to repay their kindness, I want to acknowledge their assistance.
I had the excellent fortune to be a graduate student in the Department of Government at Harvard University where this project began as a Ph.D. dissertation. Many thanks go to my teachers there and especially to my dissertation committee. I am particularly grateful to my supervisor and friend, Timothy Colton, for his ceaseless support and encouragement from my earliest interest in Russia as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, through the completion of the dissertation phase of this project under his careful guidance at Harvard. He has also volunteered to read successive drafts of the manuscript as it moved toward final publication. Special thanks also go to Robert Putnam for taking such an interest in my work, giving so generously of his time, and for pressing me from start to finish to think like a political scientist. I hope that this book in some way reflects his commitment to outstanding scholarship. Celeste Wallander patiently coached my field work as well as critically read successive drafts of this project. Finally, although not officially a member of my dissertation committee, Peter Hall took time to read several draft chapters and made valuable suggestions for improvement.
Next, this project benefited immeasurably from the kind assistance and encouragement of Jeffrey Hahn, Jerry Hough, and Blair Ruble, who, with Timothy Colton, were the sources of my initial interest in the Russian provinces. Conversations I have had with Blair Ruble while I revised the manuscript also proved invaluable. Thanks also go to my many colleagues and friends in Russia, but most of all to the late Georgii Barabashev, Aleksandr Gasperishvili, Sergei Markov, Nikolai Petrov, Sergei Tumanov, Sergei Vaskov, and Vsevolod Vasilev. Countless government officials in the Russian provinces gave willingly of their time; although there are too many to mention individually, I want to acknowledge especially the unceasing efforts of Evgenii Gorkov, Evgenii Krestianinov, Dimitri Kibirskii, Vladimir Oseichuk, and Tatiana Rumiantseva. Todd Weinberg and Katherine Moore provided friendship and sometimes a place to stay in Moscow.
Back in the United States many friends and colleagues, including Josephine Andrews, Beth Mitchnek, Nicolai Petro, Peter Rutland, Randall Stone, Steven Solnick, John F. Young, and Kimberly Zisk cheerfully read drafts of this manuscript. I am indebted to them for their many thoughtful comments, criticisms, and suggestions for improvement. Thanks also go to David Laitin for reading a draft of and making many useful suggestions for revision at a Wilder House seminar at the University of Chicago. Extremely helpful comments were also provided by Philip Roeder and an anonymous reviewer.
I am also grateful to my colleagues at Princetonparticularly Kathleen McNamara, Atul Kohli, Sheri Berman, and Jeffrey Herbst for their careful and critical readings of the manuscript and for the many helpful conversations we have had about this project. Thanks also go to Stephen Kotkin for his wonderful sense of humor and his encouragement to give this project more than I thought I had to give. Michael Wachtel generously checked all the Russian transliterations. Thanks also go to Malcolm Litchfield of Princeton University Press for believing in this project and moving it smoothly through the review process and into publication.
